Wherein I blather on RPG design, play, and stuff I design, as well as rules-lite games and classic D&D and Traveller (and others), proving that while I don't have a life, I do have a keyboard.

Friday, February 19, 2010

...and, in the death.......

The sun glows sullenly behind ochre clouds in a grey and green sky. At noon, there is but a twilight that slowly seeps out of the world as the sun slides toward the horizon, finally fading out before it sets. The night sky is inky black, with the occasional glowing patch of the moon. To the far north, the horizon glows, and launches sparks to the sky. Turn your face towards the fire and know where the north is: a wall of heat and a sea of molten rock.Stand upon the shore and smell decay; look to the sea and all is murky , choked with slime and seaweed, a net tangling the corpses of innumerable sea creatures, frothing as the long frozen gasses melt on the dead seabed. Look to the land, see a belt of fecund jungle that all too soon gives way to an arid interior and eventually the burning seas of sand, where only bones abide. Breathe: the air is thick, vile smelling, and strangely unsatisfying. The wind can change from a parchingly dry gale to a bone chilling blast in the space of a day, dropping snow that melts and steams on rocks still cooling from the mornings searing winds. Beasts of strange provenance wander through the murk, fighting for food that is all too hard to find, and all too often a fellow; fallen, unmoving except for great convulsive gasps of the foetid air. Beyond, great glacier encased peaks thrust up where continents collided - raw, sharp and uncrossable for lack of the unwholesome air.

Two ancient and enfeebled races war across the land for millenia, throwing gouts of unimaginable energy and incomprehensible science; they are locked in the final battle, all but extinct, an endless clash that will take the world as grave offerings.

And between them, in a small land, the race of vermin. Men, the exiles from the future, bred to serve their new masters, twisted by whim and need, they have forgotten all of who they are, and who they once were. Fleeing the senile lords, they escape and hide, founding kingdoms of terrible beauty and savagery amongst the ruins of the world, fighting amongst themselves with blades and stolen wizardries for the right to attend upon the final death of the tyrants and inherit the corpse of the earth.

These are the last days of Pangaea, the one continent; adrift in fire, ice and decay. The end of the Permian age, and the climax of the great death.

Hellholes and Dead Ends of the Traveller Universe : Examples of why bizarre random world generation is Fun and Interesting and not just an abomination in the eyes of planetary science.... (Link to first one here on blog)